The tech world ceases to exist without innovation.  The rate at which technologies evolve and eventually become obsolete will sink your tech-reliant business if you’re not constantly reevaluating and retooling. To keep up, unless you are satisfied with lagging mediocrity, you have to create an environment that is conducive to innovation.

There are many components to an innovation-friendly environment: the right people, the right management, the right incentives (money being one, but not the only one…), team chemistry, etc.,  but I have found that one of the more important ingredients to creating that environment is trust.

To feel free and inspired to take the risks necessary for true innovation, the players need to be able to trust their management and team members to support them.  An “every-man-for-himself” scenario will find you working in the nineteenth century quickly.  To innovate, you have to take risks.  Not all risks work out.  If the innovator is punished or “thrown under the bus” when an attempt fails, there is very little incentive to take the necessary risks again.

If you have an environment where there are multiple out-sourced teams working together you must pay particular attention to trust.  Consider the driving motivation in this scenario.  If these disparate teams are at risk of losing money or paying a penalty for missing a deadline, and there is no other common driving motivation that typically comes with working on a team such as mutual respect, camaraderie, not wanting to let each other down, etc.,  then you are ripe for an environment where the various teams do not trust each other, are quick to try to place blame on each other, and you have a situation that will suffocate innovation.  No one is willing to take any risk at all.  Every move is a safe bet and one that will lessen the chance of any blame being placed on them.  I have worked in situations like this where more time was spent considering how to not get blamed for something than was spent actually solving the problem at hand.  No need to explain how this is counter-productive. The “blame game” may achieve short-term success for a few people, but it is a terrible long-term strategy for the group.

Not all outsourced scenarios have to be this way, but it is a scenario that is difficult to make innovation-friendly.  It’s one of many hidden costs of outsourcing certain aspects of your business.  You really have to make extraordinary attempts to create a level of trust here if you hope to innovate.

Not every company can be run like Google, but it doesn’t cost anything to breed trust in your environment.   It’s not some hippy-dippy feel good theory either – ignore its importance at the risk of losing that good idea that could have made the difference.

At risk of being painfully recursive, I am curious and seeking ‘innovative’ ways to promote trust within a team, or amongst multiple teams with different agendas.  I find the usual “trust-exercises” to be trite and condescending…  so how would YOU solve the problem?